


The Impossible Man

by downtownfishies



Series: Ghost Stories [1]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-16
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:13:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 5,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22759816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downtownfishies/pseuds/downtownfishies
Summary: Beneath secrets and mysteries and ghosts and lies, Clara and the Doctor might be able to find a connection, if it doesn’t kill them first.Episode-by-episode exploration of Clara & the Doctor's relationship in series 7.
Relationships: Eleventh Doctor & Clara Oswin Oswald, Eleventh Doctor/Clara Oswin Oswald, The Doctor & Clara Oswin Oswald
Series: Ghost Stories [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1763293
Kudos: 35





	1. The Bells

He was born in a back garden and loved the first girl he saw for a hundred—or was it a thousand? years. He had died running, apologizing, saying a thousand goodbyes, and this new life grew from that ground. Running from what? Wrong question. To where? Nope, try again. For whom…? Losing and hoping and searching and searching and finding, now, the puzzle of all puzzles, a mystery tricky enough to catch his eye, get its hooks in him, pull his ship into its churning waters to drown in her, Clara, Clara, Clara.

She looks at home in the flickering light of the console room, curious and suitably impressed.

“You know,” he says, “the thing about a time machine, you can run away all you like and still be home in time for tea.”

He doesn’t want cozy, he doesn’t want tea and domestic and fish fingers. All that is fine for people living their lives one minute at a time, slowly, in the right order. But he has the power, the opportunity, the duty to take the shortcut to the new and the unknown and the never-before-seen.

And here she is, who’s ever heard of such a girl, young lady, woman, being who died twice yet lives and breathes right here in front of him, a human in a blue jumper. Reincarnation is his thing, who does she think she is? Clara, Clara, Clara.

And he managed it this time, saving her, and in the sight of her breathing anew there is the weightless tragedy of a clever governess falling to her death, the creeping despair of a brilliant engineer realizing she has been turned into a monster. He won’t lose this one, he promises himself. A waste of a perfectly good mind, for one thing, and who knows how long he would have to wait for another one? Monasteries, he has decided, are not cool.

He has so many questions for her. He starts with the first one, the least important of them, or is it the most?

All of time and space, he offers her, fake casual, real smile. Well, mostly real.

Ask me again, she answers, and walks out the door to take the long way to tomorrow.

When did he last want so badly for one of them to say yes? It’s bad business, wanting, and he tries to avoid it as much as possible. But he wants her to say yes. He wants to understand. He wants—

Well, she didn’t say no.


	2. The Ring

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You, no one else.

She peeks out the door at a street that ought to be her same old street, but it looks different with the afterimage of an angry star still burning in her mind.

“Same house,” the Doctor says. “Same city, same planet.”

Same Clara. When she traded away her mother’s ring, she thought she would feel something. Sacrifice means you don’t have it anymore, right? You give up plane tickets and childhood dreams and days and weeks and months and you get something in return. Peace of mind, a moped. She offered up the leaf and said some pretty words and saved half a dozen worlds and she’s still just Clara, 27, unemployed, with a dead mom.

Was she hoping the grief would be gone? That somehow the depth of her loss could be contained in a thing, in a physical object and then given away to a stranger and she wouldn’t have to feel it anymore? What if she’d lost more in the bargain and everything left of her mother was left on an alien planet, years and light-years from home?

But a leaf was just a leaf, and her memories, for better or worse, are still her own. At least she still has the book, tear-stain smudges and all.

The Doctor grins at her as she clutches her bag close to her and considers the book inside, one hundred and one Places to See, all the possibilities of the universe, beautiful and terrible. Something quite horrible nearly happened to them today, but it didn’t, and he is in high spirits.

Something has been rustling in the back of her mind, recognition, a memory, a briefly-glimpsed face on the worst day of her life.

“You were there. Why?” Wrong question. When?

“I was just making sure.” How many times had she turned to hairs rising on the back of her neck?

“Making sure of what?” Not only him, but the sound of the TARDIS, had she heard it before? In her childhood, in dreams? The hum is under her feet now, gentle and dormant, but always there. The ship doesn’t like her.

“You remind me of someone.” Don’t be ridiculous, it’s a ship. Ships don’t have feelings.

“Who?” And the internet doesn’t eat people, and little girls don’t sing planets to sleep. Impossible man, impossible ship with feelings and those feelings are decidedly anti-Clara.

“Someone who died.” He reminds Clara of someone who died, too. They are both haunted, the two of them, wishing for ghosts, but they can only ever be themselves.

He pulls a ring from his pocket and offers it to her with a flourish. Her mind conjures some outlandish scenarios before settling on the realization that it’s her ring. Her mother’s ring.

“They wanted you to have it,” he tells her, as she slips it back onto her finger where it belongs. She’s gotten so used to wearing it over the years that usually she doesn’t even notice it, but now the metal feels cold against her skin. “All the people you saved.”

The people _she_ saved. Clara Oswald, planet-saver. The blue door snaps shut behind her, a little more sharply than is strictly necessary. But the cranky old ship can get over itself, because _she_ saved the day.


	3. Things That Are Cold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This wasn't a test, Clara.

She’s never seen a dead body before.

She knows in a distant sense that not all the people who were trapped in the internet survived. And things got pretty dicey on the rings of Akhaten, but it all turned out OK.

She’s never seen a human body in pieces before. Three, four, maybe more young men who will never go home again. That could just as easily be her before this is done.

Clara is not freaking out. She’s in a soaking wet party dress on a collapsing nuclear submarine with a dozen terrified soldiers and a murderous Martian warrior and she is not freaking out.

_Stay here_ , the Doctor said. Yes, gladly, she does not want to meet the Martian again, thank you very much, although if it’s not too much to ask could you please just find the TARDIS and get us out of here? She’d gone to face it once, and that had gone so very well!

_It’s not my fault. I did my best, it’s not my fault, I did good, I was great, actually._

_He said so._

They warn you about strangers and they warn you about men but nothing could have prepared her for this: a man who is not exactly a man, who saves her life and offers her the adventures she has always dreamed of and then some, on a ship that can be anywhere, at any time, except apparently sometimes when they need it most it goes away and so does he.

Stupid to think they could save the day every time, to suppose they could just pop off to Vegas for the evening without a spot of mortal peril. This isn’t a holiday for him. It’s his entire life, doing things like this.

When she was in school she wrote an essay about 101 Places to See and how she wanted to travel to all of them, and her teacher had loved it, of course, but she’d asked a question Clara hadn’t been able to answer.

_Why do you want to travel the world?_

Isn’t it enough to want to see incredible things?

She can still feel the press of clammy scales on her face even after it—he—Skaldak—lets her go. It’s possible she didn’t entirely think this whole “see the universe” thing through.


	4. Things That Are Hidden

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Isn't that enough?

Clara announces that she has earned a lie-down after today’s ghostly adventures and not to wake her again this century, then wanders off to find her room, which, knowing the TARDIS, is at least fifteen minutes’ brisk walk from the console room. She doesn’t like to make things easy for Clara.

“So,” he comments to the ship, “you decided to let her in.”

One of the switches blinks at him, which he interprets: _I wouldn't have had to if you would just give her a key._

“Why would I do that? It's not as if she lives here. She's got her own life, I presume.”

Not that it interests him at all, what she does when she isn't with him, except for the professional interest, the mystery, that's all.

One of the screens, unbidden, flickers through faces, the friends who have come and gone, and the implication is clearly, _why is she any different than the others?_

Well that is the question, isn't it? What makes her different? “Emma Grayling didn't sense anything. An ordinary girl, she said. But you, you know something, don't you? You don't like her, and I can't fathom why.”

The entire bridge actually shudders at that.

“Are you laughing at me? What in all the worlds is that supposed to mean?”

No response, but for the regular old hum of her time-filled heart.

“What—jealous? Is that really—I do hope you're not insinuating anything.” Emma Grayling had perhaps gotten the wrong idea, but she was a lovesick human girl from 1974, not an omnidimensional spaceship, who ought to know better. He had played at romance and done more than play in his long years of life. He had died of a kiss, once, and spent his subsequent incarnation mooning over a life he could never have. Never doing that again. Kept the companions at arm's length, married River on a lark as they were both fully aware there was no commitment to be had there, just moments of fun snatched across the centuries. Falling in love was all fine and good for humans, and time-warp crab monsters, and even for him once and a while, but staying was another man's game. He had never quite learned to play that one; it seemed exceedingly dull when there were infinite mysteries of the universe to unravel.

One of those mysteries is Clara Oswald. That’s all she is. Nothing for the TARDIS to go getting territorial over.

He'd gotten a bit carried away at the old house, talking about love stories, and somehow his arm had found its way around her shoulders, which he had definitely not told it to do, bad arm, surely the TARDIS hadn't seen that, though... 

He throws a lever and she throws it right back and it jams in place. He doubts she would ultimately refuse to take off, she's just making a point, but unfortunately, he doesn't know what that point is.

“What? Oh, don’t be like that!”

“Are you talking to the TARDIS right now?” Clara stands in the doorway. She has changed, either her hair or her clothes or her life outlook; it can be difficult to tell the difference on humans sometimes.

“I,” he begins, but is cut off when the lever he's leaning on suddenly gives way under his hand and the ship leaps into the vortex, throwing them both off balance.

“Just,” he tries again, “a little chat.”

“Does she talk back?” Clara runs a hand along the railing with rather more respect and less intimidation than before.

“I thought you were going to bed.”

“Tried. Couldn’t sleep. Got bored. Where are we going next?” No, it's definitely her hair, as she turns and raises her eyes to take in the whole glowing ceiling. She's tied her hair back in a bun with the loose strands tucked behind her ears.

It is unlikely to have anything to do with the mystery that is Clara, but he files this image away for further consideration anyway.


	5. The Journey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So that's who—

The book is there. It’s always there, but not always in the same place. Sometimes it’s lying open on one of the big wooden tables as if someone has been reading it, sometimes it’s shelved under T for Time or W for War or N for No Thank You or F for Forget but if he runs his fingers along the spines of the books absentmindedly his fingers always catch on it. Beautiful and ancient and blood-soaked. This time it’s on a lectern against the far wall with a spotlight shining on it, is this where Clara found it? No wonder she stopped to read it even in mortal peril, it’s like the TARDIS put up a sign saying _READ THIS BOOK_. He casts an irritated glance at the ceiling but bites back a complaint. She’s had a rough couple of days.

He opens it to a page at random, then slams it shut before he does anything so foolish as start reading it. _Secrets keep us safe_ , he’d told Clara, _secrets protect us._ Some history should stay buried.

He could hide it, but the TARDIS would just move it someplace else next time she manifests the library. The book doesn’t sit well with her either; she worries at it like a wound.

But why show it to Clara? Who is she, that she should know such things about him?

And he can’t ask her again. He only has fuzzy memories of the unmade timeline, but his questions had frightened her and gotten him nowhere. She had nearly walked off a cliff rather than tell him the answers he sought, which either meant that she didn't have them or some other thing he hadn't figured out yet.

What are you, Clara Oswald? Every other moment his mind turned to possibilities and discarded them. Undying like Captain Jack—no. Secretly a Time Lord—no. Was she something new, then, something he had never seen before? It had been known to happen. Once in a while.

“I love a good mystery,” he says aloud. “What’s life without mystery?”

There was a moment in the yesterday-that-never-was when he thought he was going to lose her again. Mysteries were only fun if they eventually got solved, and another dead Clara was another dead end. He didn’t want to have to go looking for a new one—

And, well—

He rather liked this one.


	6. Ghosts & Other Horrors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You're the boss.

She’s the boss, so she has the authority to lock herself in the “human use washroom” and have a good panic.

She hears the creak and scrape of the TARDIS dematerializing, leaving the nineteenth century behind. Distantly, as if the console were miles or years away and not just outside the door. She once spent an hour wandering the labyrinthine corridors of the ship in search of a toilet, and wound up having to ask the Doctor to ask the ship where it was: behind a silver door labeled CAUTION in bright purple, a chamber the size and smell of an airplane lavatory.

This one is spacious and all over in sky blue tile and smells of flowers and lit by a soft gray light through a small window in one wall, an astonishing imitation of early morning daylight from what is, as best she can figure, actually just lights behind glass like every other window she has examined on the ship. It reminds her of her aunt Julia’s house. She yanks pins from her painstakingly-curled hair and does not look at herself in the mirror. She should probably thank the TARDIS even if this room is likely cribbed straight from her own brain. This hairstyle feels like balancing a cake on her head. And who thought this dress would be a good idea?

The Doctor, of course. _Victorian London_ , he said. _It’ll be fun_ , he said. She had suggested Elizabethan, but he’d made a face at that. The “there's a story there that I don't care to tell you” face. But Victorian seemed alright, never appealed to her much, but they had a pretty impressive Queen back then, and Charles Dickens, and all that. Except the Queen and Dickens were both likewise off-limits, but had she ever seen a lady detective who was also a lizard from the dawn of time? That had been enough to get her into this absurd outfit, but she’d hardly even gotten to see the lizard detective at all, what with being captured and petrified and stuck in a bell jar to prepare for the apocalypse. Rather, to wait for the Doctor to rescue her.

She’s not the boss, she’s the damsel to be rescued, and she can't breathe in this godforsaken dress.

“Do you require assistance?”

The voice, her own voice, gives her such a start as she fumbles with the fastenings on the dress that she nearly topples over. She glares at the copy of her face that has appeared in the mirror behind her.

“Don’t you knock?”

“I do not have hands,” she says.

“Well? What do you want?”

“TARDIS medical intervention protocol. Ship sensors detect symptoms of human experiencing a panic attack. Do you require assistance?”

She turns to face the TARDIS interface. Its eyes, her eyes, but not Clara’s eyes, stare past her. “I am not having a panic attack.”

“Biometric sensors indicate—”

“I don't care what your sensors indicate. And could you possibly choose a different face? Any other face?”

The interface flickers but remains Clara-shaped.

“Look, I’m sorry I called you a cow, and I’m sorry about the umbrella water, and saying you were creepy, and all that, and I do appreciate the improvement on the toilet situation. I am asking, please, because I feel like I’m talking to myself and I don't want to.”

This time the light shifts and reforms into a new face. A man, several inches taller than Clara or her projection, with a thin face and a frock coat that would not have looked out of place in the century they’d just left.

“Who is that supposed to be?”

“A face from your subconscious.”

“No, I’ve never seen that man before. Or was he in Sweetville? I didn’t spend much time looking at any of them.” Except her jar-mate, whatever happened to him...? But it’s not a Yorkshire accent—

The image fades and reforms again.

“Wait, who was he?”

“Internal error. It is being corrected.” The voice shifts as she speaks into one Clara recognizes with unbearable ease.

“No, we’re not doing that.”

The image of her mother tilts its head to its side. Her side. No. No, thank you.

“I’m not speaking to you if you’re going to use her. Don’t you dare.” She backs up and stumbles against the sink.

“My apologies. I did not intend to cause you distress. Is this acceptable?”

A young woman with straight dark hair down past her shoulders, big brown eyes and a pointed chin. Bridget Collingwood, who sat two seats away from Clara in one of her university classes, causing Clara to spend an entire term trying to sort out if she wanted to snog her or be her. It’s acceptable, if weighted, a reminder that the TARDIS can dredge up all sorts of secrets Clara might prefer to leave alone.

“Have you recovered from your panic attack?”

“I wasn't having—” Clara bites back the retort. She doesn’t think she was really all that panicky, but apparently having a row with a sentient ship has made her feel much better. “I’m fine.”

“Do you require assistance with your dress?”

“You don't have hands, remember?”

“I can summon the Doctor.”

“I don’t require his assistance in getting out of my clothes, thank you very much!”


	7. Nightmare in Silver, Dream in Color

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Why am I impossible?

She can’t ask about it in front of the kids, but she doesn’t forget.

_You’re the impossible girl._

The Doctor seems off as they touch down, and he uncharacteristically gets the timing just right, so even once the kids have gone and she is alone with him, she doesn’t ask him about it.

But she doesn’t forget.

She watches the kids until Mr. Maitland gets home, as if it were just an ordinary day, and Angie snaps at her for hovering, just like any other evening. The kids are fine. Artie jokes that maybe if Angie had been upgraded by the Cybermen, she’d get better marks, and they both laugh at the horrified look on Clara’s face.

“Don’t tell your dad,” she reminds them.

“It’s fine, Clara,” Angie tells her. “We learned our lesson, or whatever. Don’t get into boxes with strange aliens.”

If only Clara had learned.

Alone in her room that night, she gets out her computer. It has been in a box under her bed for weeks, switched off; she borrows the family computer if she ever needs to look something up. She’s not afraid of her own laptop or anything, it’s just that the Doctor never definitively said it was safe to use…

But there are a lot of things the Doctor doesn’t say, and just now she’s not sure she’d trust his word anyway.

She starts with the pictures Angie and Artie found: the submarine, the haunted house, and the girl from Victorian London that can’t be her. This takes her down some amusing rabbit holes of history; she learns that Emma and Alan were married in 1975 and retired to the Lake District in the 1990s, where they still reside, and makes a mental note to drop them a line sometime. The photo of the Victorian girl turns out to be from an odd little website about nineteenth-century inns, which informs her that the pictured young lady was employed at the Rose & Crown circa 1890.

The caption under the photo reads “Clara, a barmaid.”

It’s not possible… she’s not possible—an impossible girl.

Clara searches this next, but finds the phrase to be a popular one in books and songs; apparently men find impossibility very sexy. She turns back to picture of the barmaid, her own eyes gazing out of a photograph she doesn’t remember taking and another approach occurs to her, because surely the internet has some record of a nineteenth-century detective agency run by a lizard woman, her wife, and a Sontaran butler.

“Can we not?” Angie asks. She steers Artie away from a tree as they follow Clara through the gates of the cemetery, him with his nose in yet another Amelia Williams novel. “Where are you going?”

“Shortcut,” Clara says, which is not strictly true. _Members of the Paternoster Row detective agency memorialized here_ , the website had said, with directions to a place only a little out of the way from the kids’ school, but it’s not exactly their normal route home. Going across the grounds rather than going around them is the shortcut. Technically.

“Through there? I hate this place. Don’t you think it’s creepy?”

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Clara replies.

“You’ve fought robots in a theme park in the future and your boyfriend is a space alien. But you don’t believe in ghosts.”

Clara ignores the boyfriend comment—she’s given up trying to dispute it; Angie is convinced that the Doctor is the only reason Clara turned down Porridge’s proposal, and she’s a little bit right, just not in the way that she thinks she is. Clara cuts off the path to wander among the stones.

“I went to a haunted house once. Super creepy. Makes this place look like Disneyland.” She has to duck a sizable spiderweb stretched among the low branches of a tree, but she stands by that statement. “Turned out to be a time traveler trapped in a pocket dimension. I believe in Martian warriors and Cybermen and lizard women from the dawn of time, but ghosts? Not so much.”

The dates are decidedly Victorian in this section, so perhaps she’s getting warmer. Colder, physically, as the autumn breeze shakes the trees and rouses another bout of complaints from Angie. What if she finds something? What if she doesn’t? She doesn’t entirely care for the idea that one of those people she just met a few weeks ago could have been buried here in the ground all these years. And they were the Doctor’s friends. She comes back to something she asked him once, something he never gave a proper answer for. _Is my body out there, somewhere, in the ground?_

She stops in front of a weathered gray stone, and it takes her a moment to understand what it is that caught her eye.

_Clara Oswin Oswald._

“Remember me, for we shall meet again,” Angie reads aloud, and Clara starts a little, too caught up in what she’s seeing to hear her coming. “Oh, now that is creepy, she’s got your same name. Is your middle name Oswin too? That’s hilarious.”

“Yes,” Clara says, “hilarious.”

Technically, Clara is a time traveler who has come very close to death at least six times in the past four months. Technically, she could have met her end and been buried in any of those times and places. When were they in Yorkshire? 1892? Or 1893?

Artie snaps his book shut and jolts her out of her thoughts. “Are we going, or what?”

Angie can’t get out of there fast enough.

“That’s like what the girl said in my book,” he says as they round the corner into their street.

“What is?”

“ _Remember me_. Right before she blew up the spaceship with her on it.”

“That sounds grim. I’m not sure I've read that one.”

He hands it to her. “It was really good.”

The book is called _The Impossible Girl_.

She is so going to have some questions for the Doctor next time she sees him.


	8. Names

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is one place you must never go.

He turns his back, not for the first time, on the Doctor who was not the Doctor. Forgetting is easy. They should make it an Olympic sport and he’d take the gold. Forget the lives lost, forget the goodbyes never said; his memories flow in the fog around them, and he is adrift in a confusion of names and faces and ghosts and lies. Gently as he can he sets Clara down and tries to get his bearings.

“Are you lost?”

He doesn’t know how long it’s been since she came to, or how soon she might collapse again or, technically, if it's possible to leave this place. His main reasoning for believing it’s possible is that he has no intention of dying inside his own death. Not after coming all this way. Not after almost losing her for good.

“No, I am not lost. Can you walk? Or shall I—”

He steps towards her but she hurriedly gets to her feet. “I can walk, thank you! Where are we walking to?”

“We are walking… out of here.”

“Is that even possible?”

“Of course it’s possible. Probably.”

“If we can get out, then can’t the, you know, the intelligence man?” She peers around the misty landscape as if expecting the Whisper Men to jump out from any corner.

The Doctor puts his hands on her shoulders. “He’s gone, Clara, I can promise you that. Nothing here will hurt you.” She meets his eyes, searching with questions he can only guess at. He turns away quickly and starts walking again. Uphill is good, yes? They fell down to get in here, so they should go up to get out.

“Come along—come along, Clara.” His past is all around him, pulling at him, ready to tear him apart if he lets it.

Clara follows, but doesn't stop with the questions. She seems to have recovered entirely from her earlier haze, and is her usual peppy self. “That doesn’t make any sense, though. If I’m here, and you’re here, then why isn’t he here?”

“He isn’t. That’s what matters.”

“No, what matters is you’re not answering my question. Which is usually a sign that there’s something worth knowing.”

Curse the clever girl. He rounds on her. “In this case, it is a sign of something else.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t… know.”

“Yes, Clara, there are some things that even I don’t know. We’re in uncharted waters. I can hazard a guess. I can suppose that what you are and what he is—was are different, you’re made of different stuff. You’re a soufflé and he’s just milk.”

“Recipe.”

“Sorry?”

“Recipe. I’m the recipe, not the soufflé. That’s the metaphor.”

“Yes, that. Soufflé, soufflé, soufflé, all eaten up by the timestream, but the recipe remains. So all we have to do is get us recipes out of the oven, how do you like that, metaphor girl?”

“You don’t actually know how to get us out, though, do you?”

“Of course I do.” Walls of sheer rock rise around them, or perhaps fall off into shadowy chasms, or they have been wandering through an underground labyrinth, or the corridors of the TARDIS.

“But we’re in uncharted waters, like you said.”

He thinks he knows what he’s seeing, but it’s always something else when he looks at it. “I’ll get us out.”

“We don’t even have the TARDIS. Or are we still _in_ the big TARDIS?”

“We’ll be fine.”

“I jumped in here to save you, why did you have to go and jump in after me?”

“Because—Clara Oswin Oswald, you are impossible!”

She doesn’t even correct him on the name, such is her indignation. “Oh, I’m impossible? That’s rich, from the man who’s had eleven, sorry, twelve different faces!”

“A face,” he says defensively, “is just time expressing itself through the language of you. Time Lords are multilingual.”

She crosses her arms. “Are there many of you _Time Lords_ out there, then?” she asks, placing more skepticism on the name of his race than even he usually managed.

“No, there are not.”

“But there were. I saw them.”

“Clara, don’t think too hard about what you saw.”

“And why not?”

“You just witnessed all my lives at once. Your brain might melt.”

“Melt!” She puts a hand to her head, as if to make sure it’s all still there, then self-consciously switches to smoothing her hair. It’s still sticking up a bit from her fall, or perhaps from him carrying her.

“Or explode, I don’t know. Honestly, you’re the one who decided to jump into my—did you spare a single thought before doing something so, so…”

“So what?”

She waits a moment for his answer, but he hasn’t grasped the right word. It’s everything and nothing, and there’s still a loose strand of her usually well-ordered hair fluttering in the breeze of his lives.

“I’ll have you know,” she goes on, “I spared two entire thoughts. First, I’d obviously done it already, so it must be destiny or whatever. Second… I didn’t want to lose you. So there.”

She says it easily, yet also defiantly, as if daring him to keep telling her off. He doesn’t quite dare.

“Here, this is it. The right way.”

“We’re still just going in circles.”

“No, no we’re not, that is a different rock.”

She rolls her eyes, but follows his lead. Around the other side of the rock (which, yes, may have been one they’d passed a few times, but he won’t be giving Clara the satisfaction of admitting it) is a vast door.

“Human.”

“Sorry?”

“So human. That’s what I was going to say.”

After a lengthy pause, Clara asks, “Is this another of those magic doors? Does the ghost of your dead wife need to speak your secret name in order for us to get out?”

“She’s not a ghost,” he says, “I think. And no, this is a different sort of door. I think.”

“Like, a ‘speak friend and enter’ sort of door?”

“I believe… we just… knock. Four times. To be safe.” He knocks.

“Safe from what?”

He doesn’t answer that, because the door is opening. No, the door is crumbling. No, it’s glowing. Possibly all of the above. Possibly it’s not a door. He grabs Clara’s hand as the glow envelops them both and

_once upon a time an old man stole a magic box and ran away and many years later he died the end_

The timeline spits them out on the floor of the overgrown console room of the future TARDIS. His vision clears to the sight of Vastra, Jenny, and Strax standing over them, curious and relieved. The Doctor himself is relieved, that he is alive and that Clara is alive and that the apparition of River has vanished. He really would prefer not to have to deal with that right now.

Clara pushes herself to her feet and stumbles out the door to the ancient battlefield without looking at him, and he lets her go.

“Are you still angry with me?”

She didn’t come with him to see the Paternoster gang off, and he doesn’t fault her for that. It’s been a long day—several lifetimes long, in fact.

“I’m not sure,” she says, and he cannot fault her that, either. It’s rare that he doesn’t have a solution, he’s Mr. Fix-It, no, scratch that, that’s an awful name, but it’s what he does, he fixes things, but the problem of Clara is an unprecedented one and he may actually be at a loss this time.

The TARDIS lands, more gently than usual. “Here we are,” he says. “2013, just as you left it. Kids still at the cinema, I expect.”

“Yes,” she says vaguely, “I’ve got to have a word with them about tricking aliens into playing blind man’s bluff.”

“I was not tricked, I played blind man’s bluff of my own volition. And I was rather good at it, if I do say so myself.”

She tilts her head, narrows her eyes, and inwardly he cries, _Victory, she shows signs of life at last!_

She says, “How do you figure?”

“Well, I found you, didn’t I?”

She nods, slowly, far away again.

He doesn’t want to sound too eager, doesn’t want to show his hand, but he asks, “Next Wednesday, then?”

Her chin jerks up sharply as if she’d been struck. “Why?”

“Why what? It’s Wednesday, that’s what we agreed, we do Wednesdays.”

“Why me?”

“Because—” A hundred thousand possible answers catch in his throat or possibly as far down as his hearts. _Because there is no one else_ is a lie, there are a dozen maybes and somedays and could-have-beens awaiting him across time. _Because I promised you all of time and space_ , but she’s pretty well had that already, perhaps more than anyone he’s ever traveled with before. Because… there are some things he should not say. So, instead, he asks—

“Why not you?”

“You solved the mystery. Impossible girl, that’s sorted, we found the answer. My story’s done. Destiny fulfilled and all that. Isn’t that the entire reason you—in the first place—I said the words, on the phone, and you came running to find the next clue to the puzzle, but that’s all it was, wasn’t it? A puzzle to solve?”

“No, Clara, no, your story is so much more, _you_ are so much more—”

“How do you know? I’ve seen the grave, Doctor. I know I was the ghost that was haunting you. I was born to save the Doctor, and I’ve done that. What else is there?”

“Well, there’s…”

He looks at her. She looks at him.

An answer, and he cannot spit it out.

“Come back next Wednesday,” she says, and turns to go.

“I, wait, what?”

“Maybe then you’ll be able to answer me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading
> 
> please come talk to me about doctor who
> 
> I am miraclerizuin on tumblr


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